A committee of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority has rejected building a tunnel to close the 710 Freeway gap between Alhambra and Pasadena, instead urging moderate fixes to unclog bottlenecks and reduce local traffic congestion.

The Metro Board of Directors’ Ad Hoc Congestion, Highways and Roads Committee voted 3-2 late Wednesday to urge the full board to demand management solutions and put off the long-considered tunnel — unless the communities along the route can all agree such a tunnel would be worthwhile.

Agreement among the cities is a highly unlikely scenario; the communities have been divided on the freeway extension for nearly 60 years.

“This is the first time a motion has passed at Metro which would stop the tunnel from being built,” said Glendale City Councilman and Metro board member Ara Najarian. “It is huge.”

Najarian voted “yes,” along with Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger and Duarte Councilman John Fasana, Metro board chairman. Supervisor Janice Hahn and Jacquelyn Dupont-Walker, board member appointed by the city of Los Angeles, voted “no.”

A motion prepared by Fasana asks the full board to throw out the tunnel as a fix because it will cost between $3 billion and $5 billion, saying the project would be far too expensive and funding at that amount wouldn’t be available. On May 25, he wants the board to direct $110 million set aside in transportation funding Measure R for the north 710 for immediate road fixes.

“Really, the biggest issue is we don’t have the funding to build it,” Fasana said Thursday. “I thought it was time to take a break from the tunnel and focus on improvements we can make in the area today.”

However, the committee voted against the tunnel in spite of a new staff report that said the 6.3-mile single-bore tunnel, with two lanes in each direction stacked on top of each other, would provide “substantial benefits in terms of reducing congestion” and was the best of five options outlined in a 2015 environmental impact report.

A fact sheet released by Metro staff this week said the tunnel would carry 90,000 vehicles per day and would remove 42,000 vehicles per day from local streets. Motorists who would pay the toll and drive the tunnel from Valley Boulevard to the 134/210 freeway interchange in west Pasadena would cut 13 minutes off their drive time, the report said.

Critics of the tunnel, including leaders in the cities of Glendale, Pasadena, South Pasadena, Sierra Madre and La Cañada Flintridge, say the tunnel would not help reduce local traffic between Cal State Los Angeles and Rosemead, nor along Fremont Avenue and Atlantic Boulevard, often jammed north-south arterials in Alhambra and South Pasadena.

However, the report says a freeway tunnel would reduce congestion and cut-through traffic on local streets by 42,000 fewer vehicles per day.

Members of the 710 Coalition, including Alhambra, Monterey Park, Rosemead, San Gabriel and San Marino, along with construction unions, disagreed with the committee vote.

Ron Miller, executive secretary of the LA/OC Building and Construction Trades Council, said the Metro report validates the pro-tunnel position.

“The issue of the 6.2-mile gap between the 10 and the 210 freeways dates back to 1959. It is time to stop studying and start building a tunnel that completes the freeway and improves traffic for the region as a whole,” Miller said in an email.

Alhambra Councilwoman Barbara Messina, who has advocated the freeway extension for decades, said the committee’s decision was political, adding they used the lack of funding as an excuse. Metro also does not have full funding for a train or highway tunnel through the Sepulveda Pass that may cost $10 billion, she said.

“They manage to find the money for things they want,” she said.

Najarian said the Sepulveda Pass project has received unsolicited offers from private venture capitalists, while the 710 tunnel project has not. He said the committee made the prudent choice.

“I think it is a practical decision,” he said. “Rather than get it tied up in environmental issues and (court) challenges, we need to move forward with immediate relief to the corridor cities.”

Steve Scauzillo covers environment and transportation for the Southern California News Group. He has won two journalist of the year awards from the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing on environmental issues. Steve studied biology/chemistry when attending East Meadow High School and Nassau College in New York (he actually loved botany!) and then majored in social ecology at UCI until switching to journalism. He also earned a master's degree in media from Cal State Fullerton. He has been an adjunct professor since 2005. Steve likes to take the train, subway and bicycle – sometimes all three – to assignments and the newsroom. He is married to Karen E. Klein, a former journalist with Los Angeles Daily News, L.A. Times, Bloomberg and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal and now vice president of content management for a bank. They have two grown sons, Andy and Matthew. They live in Pasadena. Steve recently watched all of “Star Trek” the remastered original season one on Amazon, so he has an inner nerd.

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